Applications & OS News
PTC Channel Chief Stuart Heavyside On The ‘Massive’ SaaS Opportunity And Why Digital Marketing Is Key To Partner Success
Thomas Grillo
‘The transition to SaaS is going to drive a huge amount of revenue, which the channel is going to take more of,’ says PTC Senior Vice President and Channel Chief Stuart Heavyside. ‘We should see the pie get bigger and with that the channel get bigger as well.’
Have you established a new program to drive partners to the SaaS model faster?
That is exactly what we have been working on. We haven’t released any of the details yet because we are still working on it. I walked into the leadership of the channel six months ago and we essentially have spent the last six months focused on how to introduce this, how will the evolution happen, and what are the things we need to do to enable that. We are working on those details now and excited to release some of it soon.
Our partner program will be based around evolving to SaaS—not forgetting that we will still have non-SaaS applications out there in our world for a long time. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to protect the business while building for the future.
What is the goal for bringing the new SaaS channel program to market?
As fast as humanly possible. We are moving fast. Our goal is for our partners to be successful making the transition to SaaS. It is really that simple. So we are spending all of our time and energy doing that.
What's your sense of the appetite from the PTC channel? Are they excited for it? Are they scared? Are they somewhere in between?
I think they’re excited for it based on the partners that I’ve spoken to. They see that same transition we made from perpetual to subscription that went extremely well. Everybody did well with that transition. This is the next wave of transition. It should drive even more revenue and make for even more happier customers.
What is the opportunity to cross-sell and upsell with the PTC portfolio?
There is a massive opportunity to cross-sell and upsell. One of our stated goals as it relates to our SaaS transition is to move all of our products onto a single underlying platform. When we acquired Onshape, one of the real values of it beyond being the fastest growing CAD system in the world is that its underlying technology was built for SaaS. We named it Atlas.
We are in the process of taking all our products to try to get everything on to Atlas so it is one single database. That’s a big part of the R&D budget we are putting in place from the acquisition of Onshape.
